As technology increases, people are having more and more interactions using many different communication devices. These interactions occur in many different situations where a user may be in a more or less communicative mood, depending on their emotional or physiological state at any particular time. An individual tends to be more open and communicative if they are in a good mood or not under stress, and less open and communicative if they are in a bad mood or under stress. In the latter case, communication is less efficient.
One prior art technique allows a user to store communication and interface preferences in a memory that can be accessed and used to configure a user interface during a communication. Although an improvement in the art, this technique does not account for emotional or physiological information to be provided to a sender of information or to the originator of a voice call. Rather, this technique is concerned with hardware and software configurations of the user interface and its modalities.
Another prior art technique allows a user to send emotional information as part of a communication. However, this technique requires an active input of information by a user, and does not provide a method for a sender of information to obtain an emotional or physiological state of a recipient of the information before sending such information or making such voice call.
These examples also require a recipient to actively program preferences or provide emotional information into their communication equipment, or provide some other kind of active input. No mechanism exists to establish an emotional or physiological state of a recipient of a communication by the sender of such communication.
What is needed is a way for a sender of information to determine emotional or physiological states of a recipient of the information, and adapt a human communication interaction accordingly. It would also be of benefit if these states can be provided automatically without any action on the part of the recipient or sender of the information or initiator of the call. It would also be an advantage if a sending device could determine the state of a recipient through the recipient's communication device before the start of a communication to enable the appropriate form of communication and the appropriate modality of machine-to-human interaction.